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Tuesday, June 4, 2013

The Chicago Manual of Style announced June 3 its monthly answers to questions about writing--punctuation, capitalization, word choice, grammar, and so on. I subscribe to monthly email messages about the updates.

Items on the latest updates also appear today, June 4, in my daily online papers, Garbl's Style: Write Choices and Garbl's Plain Enligh Paragraphs. They're available at the Editorial Style and Plain Language tabs above and by free email subscription.Here are excerpts from the latest questions:

Q. In an article I am editing, the book title Di kupe appears, and in the text the author will use the Yiddish word kupe. I am following CMOS advice to italicize a foreign word if it is not in the dictionary. I am afraid that it might confuse the reader. Should I translate the Yiddish word when it is not used as a title?

Q. Is it correct to have the exclamation point or question mark immediately after the period in each of the following sentences?

Q. In the following sentence, is a comma required before “and her ten-year-old son”? “She is especially distraught when her preteen daughter, Pam, rebels by befriending a navel-pierced neighbor and her ten-year-old son, Joe, betrays her by making contact with the father.”

Q. A colleague said to me, “She is based out of Chennai.” Is this standard English?

Q. This material was published in the Philippines, but it was accessed in the United States. So we have an access date that is one day before the date of publication. Which option do you like best/dislike least?

Q. It has baffled me for years why the name of The New Yorker is sometimes written the New Yorker, and today I learned it is because the Chicago Manual advises it. I’m not sure why.

Q. When writing out a person’s title that includes a hyphen, when the first letter would be capitalized, should the word following the hyphen also be capitalized (e.g., Co-Founder)?

Q. I have an author who wants to use a quote about the subject of his book by a famous, now deceased news anchor on the cover, but it turns out that the quote is something he heard at a speaking engagement. Do you think it would be OK to use a paraphrase on the book jacket?

Q. In the following sentence, should “instead of” be replaced with “rather than”?